Since opening in 2006, Taylor St Baristas has quickly become the standard for specialty coffee in London. With a passion for high quality coffee Taylor St has grown fast, averaging more than one new store per year, to it’s current total of 9 locations. But as the company expanded, their existing POS system struggled to keep up, hindering rather than helping growth.
A scalable POS system
With comprehensive support from Bluebird, Taylor St made the switch to our iPad POS in June 2013, rolling the system out to all of their locations. Almost overnight they began to benefit from the increased productivity and efficiency of the system. Store managers and the directors were now able to view individual and consolidated financial and operational reports of their stores, with the ability to analyse at a granular level.
Taylor St’s CEO, Richard Shaer, describes how they were now able to understand if promotions were working, if new products were living up to sales expectations, and areas of the business to improve.
“We are now able to make informed business decisions quickly and easily with Bluebird, we have access to data at a level that just wasn’t available with out previous system.” – Richard, Taylor St CEO
Operational Efficiency
With the business growing, it was important to keep costs down as Taylor St scaled to multiple stores. Previously, each new store required days of manual setup and data entry. With Bluebird, Richard is able to create a new store at the click of a button, duplicating a previous setup.
“As we open up new stores, it’s a package ready to go immediately – integrated with existing stores and all with no additional overhead.” – Richard, Taylor St CEO
Day to day office admin and accounting was keeping the team from more important tasks. Automated reports, custom exportable excel files and Xero integration reduced central office admin significantly. The cloud based platform allows central office to access data without interrupting busy store managers and Richard to view real-time business performance even when travelling.
Using our complementary product, SimpleOrder, Taylor St is able to streamline internal organisation of products, reduce admin for store managers and consolidate accounting and cost reporting. Taylor St uses the software to place orders from individual stores to the central kitchen, ensuring accurate inventory counts, consolidated reporting and easy accounting.
Mobile POS
With over 1 million cups of coffee sold in 2013, speed and reliability were crucial features for Taylor St. Taking advantage of roaming iPads, Taylor St’s servers walk down the queue and take orders ahead of the tills – significantly improving the customer experience and speed of service.
With such high turnover, reliability was top of the feature list, and with internet outages a daily occurrence for Taylor St, it was key the system could work offline. Native architecture and true offline mode keep the system running without any interruption of service until the internet connection is restored.